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Jewish echoes from ancient West Arabia. Nabataeo-Arabic graffito from northwest Ḥigāz is dated to Passover of the year 303 AD. The txt was discovered by @AlsahraTeam and edited by L. Nehmé in a new volume on the inscriptions of the Darb al-Bakra.
The text begins: bly dkyr sly br ʾwsw bṭb w slm mn qdm mry ʿlmʾ
‘Yea, may Solay son of Awso be remembered well and be secure before the Lord of the World’. The term mry ʿlmʾ 'Lord of the World' must have been a theonym used to refer to the monotheistic God.
w ktbʾ dnh ktb ywm ḥg ʾl-pṭyr
‘and this writing he wrote on the day of Passover (=Ḥagg al-faṭīr 'feast of the unleavened bread')
snt mʾt w tsʿyn w sbʿ
‘the year one hundred and ninety and seven’ (dated to the era of the province of Arabia, so 197 + 106 = 303 AD).
Its lang. is 'Judaeo-Arabo-Aramaic' (a mouth full!). The fixed expressions are in Nabataean Aramaic while the term for Passover <ḥagg al-faṭīr> is Arabic. The use of ḥagg for ‘feast’ could echo Hebrew usage, and so this might be our earliest attested example of Judaeo-Arabic.
There was a thriving Nabataean Jewish community in northern Arabia, known from txts spanning the first few centuries AD. These are usually identified as Jewish based on personal names or the use of the adjective yhwdy. This is the first txt to mention a Jewish holiday.
Bibliography: L. Nehmé (ed.), The Darb al-Bakrah. A Caravan Route in North-West Arabia Discovered by Ali I. al-Ghabban. Catalogue of the inscriptions. contributions by Briquel-Chatonnet F., Desreumaux A., Ghabban A.I., Macdonald M.C.A., Nehmé L., Villeneuve F. Riyadh, SCTH, 2018.
https://twitter.com/Safaitic/status/1072139565975130113
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